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Title: Purple America: A Novel by Rick Moody ISBN: 0-316-55977-6 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 04 May, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (35 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Moody's like the off-duty cop who uses his siren to get home
Comment: Certain metaphors ought to come with expiration dates, no less than milk or medicine.
Rick Moody's third novel, "Purple America," is an ambitious, funny, beautifully written
book whose prevailing metaphor -- the faltering promise of the nuclear age, and behind it
the decline of the American nuclear family -- has begun to curdle. The military and
civilian uses of atomic physics have been with us for only half a century, but somehow
their fictional uses, irresistible over the years to numberless writers and filmmakers,
already seem as inert as a spent fuel rod.
This subtle handicap never keeps "Purple America" from succeeding as an
uncommonly empathetic fugue of voices from what's left of the Raitliffe family of
Fenwick, Connecticut, during one night in 1992. The novel starts with awkward,
stammering, prematurely middle-aged Hex Raitliffe (christened Dexter but lefthanded)
fumblingly bathing his paralyzed, vaguely senile mother, Billie, in the upstairs bathroom
of their once-stylish home. "If he's a hero," Moody writes with grace and compassion of
Hex, "then heroes are five-and-dime, and the world is as crowded with them as it is with
stray pets, worn tires, and missing keys."
For the second chapter, perspective shifts to Billie. In a pattern repeated
throughout the book, we at first resist such a wrench, having spent the previous pages
inhabiting Hex's mind with an intimacy only very fine writing can create. But before long
we are Billie's, and the subsequent sidesteps into Billie's overwhelmed second husband
Lou's company, or that of Hex's unforgotten ninth-grade love, Jane, are just as wrenching.
We're sorry to leave each one of them, even as the next one waits.
Reading "Purple America" can feel like dancing a quadrille with four very
different partners. On we go, propelled from consciousness to consciousness by Moody's
prodigious gift for ventriloquism and large, supple vocabulary, readjusting to each point
of view before trading it back for another.
Along the way Billie asks Hex for his promise to help end her life, and Lou
troubleshoots a crisis at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, where he works. The action
of the book obeys the unities, taking place over a single night on Long Island Sound, but
this doesn't keep Moody from flashing back twice to the letters of Hex's late father, who
worked on the Manhattan Project in what seemed the golden age of atomic
experimentation, long before it became such a Millstone around the national neck.
These brief interludes hold the key to "Purple America's" portentous title, in
which the colors of an atomic blast -- and of Billie's favored household decorating accent
-- combine to suggest an America where purple now connotes garishness and violence,
instead of the regal confidence it once did. The climax avoids sentimentality, perhaps
even more rigorously than an emotionally invested reader might wish.
Connecticut character studies and nuclear questions aren't incompatible, as John
Cheever showed in the classic short story "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow," where an
upper-middle-class man building a backyard bomb shelter ultimately confronts the
possibility that he wants the world to end. But in "Purple America" the cosmic stakes feel
just slightly extrinsic, an overlay, estranged from the urgency of the story. Occasionally
mistrusting his considerable powers, Moody's like the off-duty cop who uses his siren to
get home even when he's got the turnpike all to himself.
Rating: 4
Summary: A novel of suburbia with a very '90s twist
Comment: Rick Moody's Purple America is a novel of suburbia, with a very '90s twist. All of the events in this book take place during one horrible evening, and include spousal abandonment, attempted euthanasia, kinky sex, drunken combat (and combative drunkenness), return home, and filial love (and duty). Despite the short time frame involved, the plot is not easy to summarize. The main character, Dexter ("Hex") Raitliffe, has returned home to care for his almost totally paralyzed (but mentally sharp) mother, Billie, who herself has been abandoned by her husband. Billie wants nothing more than to die, but her paralysis makes suicide impossible. Hence her plea to Hex to do the deed. Hex, enraged over Billie's abandonment, sets out to find (and punish?) the husband who abandoned Billie, in a night filled with peril and unexpected surprise. Moody is a daring writer. While told in the third person, each chapter assumes the point of view of a different character. Moody's sentences range from fragments to periods which would make Cicero swoon (the second sentence in the book is more than four pages long). In a lesser writer's hands, these devices would seem forced, or simply fail. Moody holds it all together, and creates a breathtaking novel. This book requires patience and careful attention, but rewards both greatly.
Rating: 5
Summary: Brilliant. Funny. Heartbreaking.
Comment: This is the most complete, nuanced, and beautiful work I've read by Rick Moody. It's jammed with his witty observations, scathing cynicism, and ironic beauty, and it's a great introduction to his memorable character development and unique writing style.
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Title: Garden State: A Novel by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316557633 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 02 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Ice Storm: A Novel by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316706000 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 10 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Demonology: Stories by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316592102 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 10 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Black Veil by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316739014 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 12 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316578991 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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